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The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) addition to HTML is effectively DRM with the blessing of the W3C. It’s bad for accessibility, bad for usability, bad for security, and as the Internet Archive rightly points out, it’s bad for digital preservation.

Much as I respect Tim Berners-Lee, his logic here is completely flawed. First of all, treating DRM as though it’s an implacable force of nature is a category error. Secondly, EME doesn’t in any provide a standardised solution: it provides a sandbox for each DRM vendor to inject their own proprietary solution.

Mike runs through the history of Flash. Those who forget the history of the web are doomed to repeat it:

The struggle now seems to be turning to native apps versus non-native apps on the mobile platform. It is similar to Flash’s original battle ground: the argument that the Web technology stack is not suitable for building applications with a polished user-experience.

Henri gives an overview of the DRM-style encryption proposed for HTML. It’s a very balanced unbiased description, but if you have the slightest concern about security, sentences like this should give you the heebie-jeebies:

Dr Harry Halpin writing in the Guardian about the crucial crossroads that we have reached with the very real possibility of DRM mechanisms becoming encoded within HTML:

Most of us are simply happy to launch our browsers and surf the web without a second thought as to how the standards like HTML are created. These standards are in the hands of a fairly small set of standards bodies that have in general acted as responsible stewards for the last few years. The issue of DRM in HTML may be the turning point where all sorts of organisations and users are going to stop taking the open web for granted.

A great post by Stuart on the prospect of DRM-by-any-other-name in HTML.

The argument has been made that if the web doesn’t embrace this stuff, people won’t stop watching videos: they’ll just go somewhere other than the web to get them, and that is a correct argument. But what is the point in bringing people to the web to watch their videos, if in order to do so the web becomes platform-specific and unopen and balkanised?

John has come to the same conclusion as Richard with regards to font embedding. In short, the font foundries are missing a huge revenue stream. They could be offering fonts on a per-domain basis (a la Google Maps or any other third-party API). Remâ€¦